Many electronic musical performance instruments are available today. FIG. 1 illustrates a typical commonly available electronic musical instrument. These instruments typically have human input components that emulate the primary interface for human performers to interface with a conventional musical instrument. The most common such input components take the form of a piano keyboard (varying in the number of keys). However, other electronic instruments have other inputs such as pads that can be used to simulate the interface of a human with a drum or drum set or xylophone. Other interfaces such as, wind instrument or string instrument may also available.
The electronic musical instruments take the human input and convert that input into different types of audible signals. In some cases, these signals are audible sound. In some cases, the signal generated is an analog signal or in some cases a digital signal which can be converted into analog sound. These electronic musical instruments are typically programmed to generate the sound of one or more particular musical instruments —for example an upright piano, grand piano, organ, guitar, electric guitar, etc.
These electronic musical instruments typically employ the use of electronic processors running proprietary sound generation hardware and software for converting the input into an audio signal.
Although they are not musical instruments, personal computers have been used as musical synthesizers to generate musical sounds. In fact, many different personal computer (PC) based musical synthesizer software programs are available. These systems are based on standard PC infrastructure. The PC runs an operating system and the sound synthesizer software can run on top of the operating system. Some of these programs are proprietary and some are non-proprietary. Input devices such as a piano style keyboards are available that can be used as inputs to the PC software system. FIG. 2 illustrates such a device. Typically, these input devices connect to the PC through a MIDI communication card installed in the computer or through some other communication interface such as USB or Firewire which are well known in the personal computer and personal computer software arts.
However, both existing electronic musical performance instruments and PC sound synthesizer systems have significant creative and practical limitations. The PC systems are not suitable for a live musical performance environment. They are not “road worthy” and require a great deal of set up, are designed for a fixed set up, and after set up take a relatively long time to boot up and generate music. On the other hand existing performance electronic instruments also have limitations. For example, prior art musical instruments limit the user to their proprietary sound generator. Additionally, they must be connected to a host computer to gather sound files and patches. These embedded hardware instruments are inherently and intentionally more limited in their ability to compose music because they are built around memory, ergonomic, and display screen restrictions. Furthermore even where they allow modification, electronic instruments frequently are limited by file format restrictions. For the similar design considerations as those mentioned immediately above, electronic instruments use proprietary storage formats based on standard technologies i.e., floppy drive with nonstandard file format. An electronic musical performance instrument with greater creative flexibility is desired.
While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments thereof are shown by way of example in the drawings and are described below in greater detail. It should be understood, however, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit the invention to the particular form disclosed, but to the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the present invention as defined by the claims.